Review: Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy

It’s not every day you find a chocolate bar with “Carbon Dioxide” listed in the ingredients.

As Dairy Milk continues in their frantic mission to add just about everything imaginable into a chocolate bar – toffee bits, cookie dough, pretzel chunks, cashews, coconut, etc. – this Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy bar stood out as particularly oddball. It doesn’t explicitly tell you what’s inside it on the wrapper; you’re supposed to put the pieces together yourself, based on the name and illustration. My guess is jelly beans, Skittles, Smarties and Pop Rocks, all buried in a slab of milk chocolate. I bought it to verify this theory.

The Look: Old-time circus/carnival flair on the wrapper. Deliberately cryptic yet bold, like a barker enticing you to enter a sideshow tent. There are indeed chunks of candy embedded in the chocolate bar. It’s like someone dumped a corner of a candy store into a vat of chocolate, then made bars with it.

The Taste: Gummies, pop rocks, tiny candy-covered chocolate ovals and, of course, the milk chocolate that binds it all together. The mix of flavours in the first chunk tasted like a particularly chocolatey Big Turk bar that popped as it dissolved. Utterly strange, yet very entrancing.

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RATINGS AND DETAILS

Cost: $1.26 for a 47-gram bar at Save-On-Foods in Edmonton, found on sale for $0.99.

Value for cash money: Good.

Availability: Limited.

Nutrition?: Per bar (47 grams): 240 calories, 12 grams of fat, 40 mg of sodium, 0 grams of fibre, 3 grams of protein.

The verdict: The best part of this chocolate bar isn’t the taste; it’s the fun factor. Several decades ago, a chocolate bar was a special treat. These days, chocolate bars are a relatively mundane, ordinary snack. This bar brings some of that child-like magic back.